When printmaker Maritza Davila was invited to show her work this summer at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, she used the exhibition to honor her late father.

Ramón Davila-Cruz, a guitar player who died in 1993 at age 83, “had amazing self-discipline — with his work, his studies, his professional development, his skills. He taught me that — discipline and dedication to my craft and commitment to what I feel I should be doing,” said Davila, a professor of printmaking at Memphis College of Art.

“Ancestry and Identity: Prints by Maritza Davila,” opened July 27 and will hang in the Kraft Gallery at Brooks until Dec. 2.

Davila, 62, a native of Puerto Rico, dedicated an entire gallery hallway to her father’s memory. “It was a way to come to terms with the loss of my father,” she said.

The determination he instilled in her led Davila to leave Puerto Rico in the 1970s, with little command of English, to enroll at the Pratt Institute in New York for her graduate studies.

“It wasn’t that easy with all the prejudices I encountered — as a Puerto Rican and as a woman. For me it was a cultural shock,” Davila said. “I had reservations because my English-speaking skills were very poor. I could read and write English, but I had never practiced.”

She earned her master’s degree in printmaking and painting, and tried her hand at various jobs in New York, including screen printing on glass, teaching pre-Colombian history through art at the Museum of Natural History, and other teaching jobs, until she and her husband, Jon Sparks, decided to move to his native Memphis in 1981.

Within a year, Davila began her career as a printmaking instructor at MCA, where she has tried to pass on to her students the same values she learned from her father.

“I tell them to do whatever it takes to accomplish what they need to accomplish,” she said.

Over the past 30-plus years, Davila has taught classes in bookmaking, drawing, painting, lithography, screen printing, etching, woodcutting, many techniques found in her own vast body of work.

For the portfolio dedicated to her father, Davila created intaglios using images of her father playing guitar, of his sheet music and his journals, transferred onto different types of paper, which she then collaged onto other images.

In the adjoining room, a “chapel,” she continues with similar techniques: She constructed an altar with candles on top, milagros of pendants attached to the skirt, and images of her mother and father above it and her daughter on either side.

“My daughter is like the virgin with one looking up and the other looking down,” Davila said. “She is completely encased, oblivious to anything going on around her, as if she is a figure never to be touched by anything but goodness.”

For her mother, Dolores Irizarry-Valentín, she used images of domestic life and the mountains.

“She was a caretaker, and her family is from Spain, from the mountains,” Davila said.

The altar and images pay tribute to Davila’s religious upbringing, touching on Catholicism, espiritualism and Santeria.

“This exhibit is the opportunity to do something I’ve always wanted to do on the scale I’ve wanted to do it,” she said.

On Oct. 27, Davila will display two of her handcrafted books in the Boston Printmakers Biennial, a highly competitive juried show that selected only 130 works out of 2,300 submitted.

“What I am proud of is that they chose two of mine,” she said.

Having participated in art biennials in Poland and other such shows, Davila often has these opportunities, and she makes it a point to globe-trot while learning new techniques.

“I’ve been to Spain, Argentina, Scotland, Italy,” she said.

With a studio full of reference books, textbooks, history books and catalogs, Davila is always in learning mode.

“I’m a great believer in research,” she said. “Everything I do, I do a lot of research.”

It’s something she picked up from her father.

“My father was self-taught after eighth grade. He was extremely knowledgeable,” she said.